Oregon is enlightened; yet another reason to move (back) to Portland. If you haven’t heard, the Supreme Court upheld Oregon right-to-die law, which was voted on twice there (I actually voted for it the first time when living there about 10 years ago). The Bush Administration has tried everything to trample on this instance of [...]

This French commercial my colleague Michael Bess sent me from Aix-en-Provence (where he’s doing a study abroad director junket) is priceless. That there are commercials like this in Europe and not in the U.S. (”land of the free and home of the brave”) speaks volumes:
BestCommercialEver.mpg(2.1mb)

iWeb is the new app in Apple’s iLife ‘06 suite that coordinates all of your media and publishes it all nice and tidy to the web. It works best with a .Mac account, but you can upload to other servers and lose a little functionality. For those of you who remember iBlog or BlogWave Studio, [...]

Do you have it? If you do, you might be among those who contribute to the estimated $800-$900 million in lost business because they will not fly on planes or do business in a normal fashion on Friday the 13th, according to the Stress Management Center and Phobia Institute in Ashville, North Carolina. I didn’t [...]

Well, I was — for better or for worse — in top form for the first day of my anime course. There are 36 students (up from 22 last time), and most seemed to appreciate my animated craziness. Some probably thought I was just insane. Or on drugs. I did have a script to stick [...]

The spring semester for my courses starts tomorrow (Thursday), so I sit here getting materials and notes together. I’m teaching my Japanese animation course, which is fun but a lot of work. And I have to deal with otaku; that is, fanboys who are into anime way too much and have seen far more than [...]

This is pretty damn cool. Google Maps software is finally out for Macs and after one minute I was hooked. Typing in the name of my favorite cultural landmark (Wrigley Field) as my first try at it yielded a direct hit and the zoom in on the corner of Clark and Addison was awesome. Click [...]

Okay, so I’m a part-time geek that gets excited about Apple ads. The new one for the Intel-driven Macs announced today is all right. See it here. I still wish this were an ad showing a Mac mini displaying HD cable TV on a projector system with 5.1 dolby digital audio being remotely controlled [...]